US justice sues Google for abuse of monopoly position – update

The US Department of Justice is suing Google for alleged abuse of its monopoly position in the search and advertising market. The indictment mainly focuses on the internet company’s antitrust practices.

The indictment was announced Tuesday afternoon by Deputy Secretary Jeffrey Rosen, The New York Times writes. The charge is aimed at the search company Google, not at parent company Alphabet that it falls under. Google would have a status as ‘gatekeeper of the internet’, the ministry states. The company is said to have made several deals with companies that reduced the chance of competitors to succeed in order to maintain its monopoly position. This includes the fact that Google makes billions from online ads, and uses that money to become the default search engine on mobile phones and browsers.

The charge also concerns the fact that Google’s search application is included by default on all Android phones and that it cannot be removed. Because of this position, Google controls more than eighty percent of the search market in America. As a result, competitors themselves would not be able to process enough queries to build a service that can compete with them, and thus customers have less choice and less innovation in the marketplace. Advertisers would also have too little chance of competing on price.

The indictment follows two weeks after the publication of a major investigation into the abuse of monopoly positions by major tech companies. In the 449-page report, a committee of the US House of Representatives concluded that not only Google, but also Amazon, Apple and Facebook have a monopoly and are abusing their dominant position.

In recent years, the tech giants have regularly come under fire from politicians and regulators about the dominant positions they hold. Last year, the US Department was given the power to start investigations like this one. The government’s competition committee did the same at the time.

Google responds in a tweet that it will later issue a statement, but the company already calls the charge “very flawed.” “People use Google because they choose to, not because they are forced to or because they cannot find alternatives,” said the search giant.

Update: 18:51: Google has posted an extensive response online. In it, the company states that users can easily change search engines and refers, among other things, to Microsoft, which installs Edge by default and sets Bing as the search engine in Windows.

The full charge of the United States Department of Justice can be read on Scribd.